March 9th, 2010.
Luca Spinelli
About eight months ago we posted an Xcelsius solution called Export2Excel on the myxclesius.com blog. Thanks to support and comments from the Xcelsius developer community and some serious investigating, it is a pleasure for me to announce that the new Export2Excelv3 for Xcelsius (Tomcat version) is now up and running. Version 3 works with Xcelsius 2008 SP3 and it supports multiple languages. You will find the Export2Excelv3 files at the end of this post.*
For those who are new to Export2Excel, this component allows BI Developers to add export functionality to an Xcelsius dashboard so that end users can then filter results by selecting part of their dashboard. It is a great option for users who want to look at data outside of the predefined dashboard components.
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March 1st, 2010.
Luca Spinelli
In the past few weeks we have been working on a migration from BusinessObjects XI R2 to XI R3.1. This should be a simple upgrade that can be implemented by following the BusinessObjectsXI R3.1 wizard. But what happens if something goes wrong during the upgrade? We were asking ourselves this question before migrating production for one of our customers. Then an idea came to us: we decided to leave BusinessObjects XI R2 as it was and also install XI R3.1 on the same machine.
For this to be possible, we had a couple of things to consider first:
- Two tomcat servers working on the same port
- BusinessObjects XI R2 and XI R3 services working on the same ports
Moreover, we decided not to use any BIAR files to migrate the BusinessObjects content to the new release.
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February 19th, 2010.
Ilmari Aalto
One of the things OBIEE doesn’t have out of the box is a user comment option (although future versions may have integration with Oracle Webcenter, which provides social computing). So what are our options if we need to leave comments about specific reports/dashboards or give users the option to add documentation to the reports? One option is to embed Google wave in an OBI dashboard for feedback and wiki type documentation.
Google wave is a new kind of collaboration tool that combines elements of email, wiki and chat. Basically everything on a wave can be edited. A varying number of users can be part of the wave or it can be public like in the example below. A wave can be embedded on any Web page. An embedded wave can be edited either on the page itself or through Google wave accounts.
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February 12th, 2010.
Lluis A
This article explains how to design a professional-looking flash file using the famous freely downloadable AnyMap add-on for Xcelsius.
A multitude of opportunities exisit for using AnyMap in Xcelsius. Typically we want to embed an interactive system like a layout for a car park, airport, or a typical regional map – see Figure 1 for an example. Using AnyMap we’ll be able to show different information with a mouse over or a mouse click.
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February 1st, 2010.
Gianluca Nacci
One of the greatest advantages of buying an OBI Application – Project, Supply Chain or any other of the many Analytics flavours – is the set of predefined ETL mappings, sessions and workflows that come with it.
Although there is a good chance that the OLTP data source is highly customised, the online Oracle documentation is full of information that can make the ETL developer’s life easier. That said, there are some important ETL tasks whose logic isn’t very easy to find. They are like black boxes: you customise them a little bit – some fields behind the X_CUSTOM placeholder here, a small datatype change in the target table there – and they operate their magic.
So let’s reveal the truth behind the veil of a very important out of the box ETL logic in OBI Apps: the Slowly Changing Dimension management mappings.
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